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Thursday, June 28, 2012

The Precision Teaching Book

Creating a sound educational program, like the Direct Instruction reading program, takes determined effort in the planning, creation, implementation, and subsequent review and revision of the curriculum. In other words, engineering a learning environment expressed by a well balanced, potent curriculum occurs through a reasoned and rational process. Effective learning environments establish desired behavior and require no less than a systematic analysis of human behavior.

You mean...writing an effective curriculum isn't something you can pay teachers a stipend to do for 3 days over the summer?

We've had years of strife over Trailblazers here in my district, culminating in the middle school teachers complaining that kids were coming into 6th grade not knowing what they needed to know. In response, the answer was ... not to adopt Singapore Math.

The answer was to "hybridize" Trailblazers during a 3-day curriculum development stint one summer. After hybridization, Trailblazers would no longer be our curriculum; our curriculum would be Irvington Math. Problem solved.

Rejiggering Trailblazers has been an ongoing project. A year or two before we hired the lady from Bedford, I went to a board meeting at which the then-assistant superintendent for curriculum (we've had several), confronting that year's uprising, said impatiently, "People say Trailblazers is our curriculum." She rolled her eyes. "It isn't. We write our own curriculum."

That's been the answer forever: there's no problem with Trailblazers because Trailblazers isn't the curriculum.

17 comments:

Heh. That right there should have sane people fleeing for the hills or at least sharpening pitchforks and fueling torches. Sadly we do the same sort of thing where I am...we use "our own" curriculum, not some nasty outside curriculum.

This absurd notion that because a curriculum tells you WHAT to teach it is therefore also telling you HOW to teach is starting to wear on what few frayed nerves I have left. And besides, some people would benefit from being told HOW to teach...just sayin'

And what is this "stipend" you speak of? We're expected to create our curriculum during the school year, in 40-60 minute spurts, with twice-yearly 3 hour spurts. I know not of "stipends" and I fancy you are dabbling in witchcraft, madam.

When we went to look at a private school years ago and questioned their use of Everyday Math, they quickly replied that it was supplemented. How do you supplement repeated partial learning? How do you hybridize Trailblazers? Ask them for details. When we did that at one school, they said that we could make an appointment with the teacher and she could show us some of the details. They didn't have a "curriculum". They just had teachers' lesson plans.

I've always objected strenuously to hearing that Trailblazers was going to be supplemented (that was in the early days) and, now, "hybridized."

Both projects are admissions that Trailblazers doesn't work, and the idea that a school would deliberately buy a bad product and then spend more money trying to make it better - **and** spend children's grade school years on this mishegoss in the process -

No one in his right mind buys a bad car on grounds that he can take it to the repair shop when the problems surface. And yet school personnel feel perfectly comfortable explaining their actions in these terms.

They do what they do.

Things became even worse around here when, two years ago, the then-curriculum director (a different one) as much as said it wouldn't be fair to teachers to switch the curriculum so fast. She said all the other districts that dropped Trailblazers had it for longer than we'd had it.

As for the stipends for writing curriculum -- in days of yore, my district did commission classsroom teachers to write curriculum units for specific purposes, under the direction of a curriculum leader or subject specialist, during the summer, and it did pay (not a lot).

One summer I worked on a science unit about urban trees for fourth grade (a team of about six developed several mini-units designed to take about two weeks ); another summer, I was on a team to produce a middle school math book for ELL kids -- those recently arrived with limited English -- that covered the basic operations, geometry, measurement, ratio and proportion, fractions, decimals and a few other topics. It was not intended to be an introduction to the topics or a thorough treatment, but rather a quick refresher in English with clear models, limited yakkety-yak, and "real-life" applications. They hired a student artist to illustrate it and the result was pretty good, I thought. The project co-ordinator was a math consultant.It was meant to be used in summer school or ELL booster classes.

We worked for 20 days and got paid around $1000 as I recall. That was more than a decade ago, and now "lead teachers" are asked to meet in teams (after school) and produce these units gratis, presumably for the glory of being a "leader."

A propos of "we write our own curriculum," not long ago, the principal of the school I was at required teachers to throw out "canned" resources, like pre-packaged units on explorers, electricity or multiplying fractions, because these were not "authentic." Teachers were told they had to prepare their own materials from scratch and customize them to the unique needs of their students. Even textbooks are to be "only an occasional resource, never the core of the instruction."

Catherine, thanks for the reminder about Rick Kubina's book -- a friend showed me a copy and I meant to order it, must hop to it now that school is out -- it looked very thorough and practical.

You MUST live-blog from Morningside! It was a fabulous three weeks -- give my regards to Kent and Kris Melroe and Deb Brown and everyone else, what a great bunch of people. A thoroughly upbeat and powerful learning experience -- I wish I could go with you!

Magister Green, what do you mean by curriculum? As the word is commonly used, to mean "textbook series" it absolutely means how to teach not what to teach. the standards are what is taught.

Catherine, your analogy doesn't line up."No one in his right mind buys a bad car on grounds that he can take it to the repair shop when the problems surface. And yet school personnel feel perfectly comfortable explaining their actions in these terms. "

Public schools are told they must teach what their state government says they must teach. No textbook system out there corresponded well to NY's state government standards. So every system was going to be supplemented. It wasn't like buying a car at all. It was like being told they needed to get from City A to City B when they can't have a car at all, just some bus schedules and train schedules. And no nonstop routes.

The problem is writing their own curriculum is like trying to build themselves a car from scratch instead.

K-5 generalists have absolutely no ability to write mathematics curricula from scratch, not to mention they don't have the time.

Sadly, most content specialists in math don't know how to either, because they didn't take seriously elementary math.

But that's why having a backbone curriculum like Singapore's Primary Math is so important so there is a serious pedagogy coupled with good content.

But most textbooks are so bad that teachers have never seen math making sense, so they don't know it matters. Same with the administrators.

the latest way teachers are denied and are denying math making sense now is that the data driven instruction movement is pushing schools to change the order of their lessons so they can shoehorn them into their interim testing regimen, as if math isn't predicated on prior math.

So there are schools that take Saxon or EM or whatever and teach it out of order, which means it makes even less sense.

btw, the state tests are now quite a bit more difficult to pass ... though that may be simply because they've changed the cut scores (I don't remember).

I don't know whether this has increased pressure on the district to teach the state standards. We still have a very large majority of kids passing all tests, although that majority is not as large as it was.

A propos of "we write our own curriculum," not long ago, the principal of the school I was at required teachers to throw out "canned" resources, like pre-packaged units on explorers, electricity or multiplying fractions, because these were not "authentic."

RIGHT!!!!!

It is INCREDIBLE.

The two BOE candidates who just won election ambushed the then-curriculum director a couple of years ago on the subject of a bad middle school Spanish textbook.

She was blindsided, and didn't recover quickly; she had had no idea there was a lousy Spanish textbook in the middle school.

The answer she came up with was: "We're getting away from textbooks."

So the plan is for every Spanish teacher to write his/her own textbook apparently.

Either that or everyone can make a lot more Spanish menus on Powerpoint.

"The answer she came up with was: "We're getting away from textbooks."

"So the plan is for every Spanish teacher to write his/her own textbook apparently."

Oh my goodness. We were talking about that stuff a few weeks ago.

It occurs to me that one of the things that causes the lack of progress in K-8 foreign language instruction is the lack of continuity. You do one thing, then you do another thing, and then you do a completely different thing, and by the time you get back to the first thing, it has to be completely retaught. That problem would be exacerbated by encouraging teachers to scrap the textbook and just come in with a pile of copies taken from somewhere in the internet every week. One of the really good things that a well-thought out textbook can do is make sure that old skills get practiced at regular intervals. Asking teachers to ditch the textbook and fly by the seat of their pants is so irresponsible. (You don't suppose the district is just trying to cheap out on buying a textbook?)

One of the really good things that a well-thought out textbook can do is make sure that old skills get practiced at regular intervals.

Absolutely!

(You don't suppose the district is just trying to cheap out on buying a textbook?)

That's been an issue for years .... specifically with foreign language textbooks. I don't know why. But there have been multiple years in which there weren't enough Spanish textbooks to go around (maybe not enough French, either. I don't know.)

This is probably one of those bad ideas that is helpful to the powers that be in numerous ways...

I take her statement with a grain of salt. She was on the spot, and that's what she came up with -- which is interesting because she obviously felt that "We're getting away from textbooks," something the BOE had never heard before (I'm pretty sure) was NOT a bombshell but an obviously good thing everyone would immediately recognize as good.

Certainly no one challenged that statement, which was simply dropped into the middle of a board meeting.